The Mysterious Adventures of a Time Lord and a Vampire
by nightwish-shadowstalker
Summary: ONGOING - updated as and when I write the next chapter. Tenth Doctor and OC fic. And for the record, she's not actually a vampire. If you've read 'Circularity', you'll know what I'm talking about!
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: It's arrived! All the way from the depths of Narnia... well, my mind, at any rate.**

Chapter One: Chance meetings.

Sometimes, the Doctor thought, it would be nice not to have the evening interrupted by monsters. He'd been sat in a coffee shop, drinking tea and pretending to read – what he was actually doing was people-watching. Invisible, unnoticed, watching the ebb and flow of life. The crowd of women on a hen-night, laughing, staggering from one bar to the next. Three or four men watching a football match on the pub's TV over the road. A gang of teenagers, playing pool and talking loudly about music and gaming. One girl caught his eye – on her own, hood up, headphones in, dressed entirely in black. It was hard to tell where she stopped and the shadows began. The gang of teens barely noticed her, and when they do it looked like it was only to insult her. He felt a pang of sympathy for her – _I know what it's like being on your own_. Then she looked up, watching him watching her. They both smiled at being caught and looked away.

Now, hidden in the mouth of the alleyway, the Doctor watched as the hunters chased people under the streetlights. _Twenty-ninth century_, he thought. _They might be older, but they're none the wiser for it. Revival of the old ways around that time. But they're all wearing teleporters… if I could just get one of them, I could send them all back, easy. It's the getting-one-without-getting-shot part that bothers me._

A flicker of movement behind him caught his attention, and he turned to see the girl from before. The outsider.

"Do you have a plan?" she asked dryly.

"Right now, I've got about half a plan," he replied quietly. They moved a little further into the alley, hiding in the shadows.

She shrugged in the half-dark. "Well, I've got half a plan too. Do you want to put them together?"

He smiled, although she couldn't see it. "Sounds good to me."

"Okay then. You go right and I'll go left."

Between them, they managed to catch and disarm one of the hunters with relative ease. When they took off his mask, the hunter seemed genuinely surprised that they appeared to be human, and reasonably advanced.

"Revivalists," the Doctor muttered disdainfully, fiddling with the teleporter. "Never understand what they purport to bring back." He turned to the girl. "Can you shine the torch over here?"

The hunter snarled angrily, struggling against the improvised electrical-flex bonds. "Pathetic. Like you'll be able to stop us when you can't even tie us up properly," he hissed, freeing himself with a single violent movement. The girl sighed.

"For goodness' sake. Can't you just be a well-behaved hostage?" she asked, catching his flailing arm and twisting it up into a shoulder lock. He whimpered as she gently pushed the joint a little bit further than it was meant to go. Holding the lock with one hand, she took the torch back with the other and continued to illuminate the intricate inner workings of the teleporter.

"Those who do not know their history are fated to repeat it," she muttered as the light flashed on the face of the device and the hunter vanished with a faint pop. "Will that have sent back all of them?"

"It'll have sent back all the devices and blocked these co-ordinates," the Doctor said.

"So any of them stuck here won't be able to get home."

"Exactly!" the Doctor grinned. "I love it when a plan comes together."

She smiled wryly. "On behalf of the planet, I believe I owe you a drink, sir."

They walked to an all-night café down the road. In the light, he looked at her properly – older than he'd first thought, maybe nineteen or twenty, certainly older than her years. Tall, slender, black hair and pale skin. Heavy dark eye make-up and black jeans and hooded leather jacket, which got hooked over the back of the chair despite the cool interior of the establishment. Tattoos over her arms.

"How did you know how to reverse the teleport, then?" she asked later, when they were sat down drinking coffee and tea respectively. "I mean, I'm pretty sure that's not been invented yet. Not here, anyway." She took a long drink of coffee and regarded at him curiously. "Who are you? Where are you from? I don't even know your name."

He held her gaze calmly. "I'm the Doctor. And you are?"

"Sarah Lee Black. Nice to meet you, Doctor. Thanks for saving the planet, by the way." She laughed. "On a slightly more practical level, I'd better pay for these." She stood and walked to the counter, idly fiddling with the wallet zip. He smiled unconsciously at the tattoo on her upper back – _now that's dedication, it must have been agony_ – black skeletal bat wings across bony shoulder blades.

"Why the bat wings?" he asked, once she'd sat back down with another cup of coffee.

"Mostly to make a point to my family that they can't control me any more. Partly because bats are traditionally neither bird nor beast and don't fit in easily. And I like a different kind of music to everyone else," she laughed. "A psychoanalyst would have a field day." She took a sip of coffee, wincing slightly at the burn. "But you didn't answer my question. Where are you from?" She half-smiled. "I mean, are we talking another planet, another time?"

"Both," the Doctor replied.

She nodded. "Figures. What's it like?"

He frowns. "What's what like?"

"Your home world."

"Beautiful. It was beautiful." He sighed softly. "Long gone."

Her expression saddened. "I'm sorry."

He shrugged briefly. "You weren't to know." The dark look remained for a second, then faded. "Anyway, why would I want to go home? There's a whole universe out there."

She looked almost shell-shocked. "You've got a… a starship?"

"Indeed I do. Bonus points for the correct terminology, by the way." He grinned at her. "Curious?"

"Dying of it." He stood and offered her his hand. She accepted, smiling. "Lead on, MacDuff, and all the rest of it."

He led her to the quiet side-street where the TARDIS was parked. Sarah looked at it, looked to the Doctor, then curiously walked around it, running her hand over the side. "It's humming."

"It does that."

She smiled at him. "Camouflage? Trying to blend in with Earth tech? I mean, I'm assuming here that your futuristic starship isn't actually made of wood."

"Landed in the 1960s a while back and the Chameleon Circuit broke," he admitted. "Never got round to fixing it."

"I like it," she smiled. "Blue's a good colour for a time-travelling, shape-shifting starship."

"I like how you're so blasé about the idea," the Doctor said wryly.

"Trust me, I'm hiding my incredulity very well right now," she replied. "And besides, I've already seen people teleporting around killing others for fun tonight. A time-travelling shape-shifting starship is far less intimidating, believe me. You going to open it, or shall we just stand here all evening admiring it?"

He laughed. "Alright. For helping me save the planet." He unlocked the doors. "After you."

She stepped inside and burst out laughing. "Okay, now I've seen everything. You have a time-travelling, shape-shifting starship that defies the laws of physics, and there's a hat-stand by the door."

He stepped in behind her and shut the door. "Why not? Hat-stands are useful things, and it makes sense to keep it by the door."

Sarah shrugged. "True enough." She hung her leather jacket on a hook and turned to smile at him.

"Anywhere, any when. The whole of time and space through those doors." He grinned at her. "Where and when do you want to start?"


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two: Circularity.

"I want to know how the legend of the vampire started."

That was the first place they went – 1859 Transylvania, the origin of the first mention of Dracula the blood-drinker. Nice enough place, friendly locals. All very religious, praising God at every opportunity. They booked into the one guest room available in the town – the other one was occupied by a Frenchman they only ever saw smoking a pipe or reading a newspaper at breakfast.

They'd gone out for a walk, exploring the little town, wandering through the market, when the Doctor had fallen and sliced open his palm on a piece of broken glass. By the time they got back to the hotel room, there was blood dripping down his wrist.

"Okay, we've got bandages, we've got – shit, the water isn't clean." Sarah cursed in frustration. Then she noticed a bottle of vodka in the corner of the room - compliments of the house, presumably.

"Alcohol should sterilise the wound - that'll have to do," she muttered. "This is going to hurt, okay?" She said a little louder, kissing his palm briefly. She wasn't entirely sure why, but he didn't seem to mind. "Not for long. Over soon."

He winced, but said nothing as she cleaned and bandaged the wound. He smiled at her – "Thanks" – and sighed tiredly, lying back on the bed.

Someone knocked on the door.

"What is it?" Sarah asked, opening the door without thinking. The woman on the other side backed away rapidly, muttering, "El dera cula, o me disa, el dera cula!" She made the sign of the cross frantically, and continued to do so until she'd backed up to the corner hiding the stairs.

"'El dera cula?'" she asked aloud in puzzlement.

"'She drank his blood, Lord preserve me, she drank his blood,'" the Doctor translated. Sarah glanced into the grubby mirror hanging over the washbasin.

"Oh, shit. Of course." _I have stupidly pale skin and black hair, I'm dressed in black, he's lying on the bed like a corpse, and this would be the one time I decided to wear a shirt that shows the bat wings._

"Look on the bright side," the Doctor said, as they frantically grabbed their belongings and beat a hasty retreat to the TARDIS. "Now you know where the legend of the vampire started."

"Yeah. Me. Now that's circularity for you."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Arguments.

"Don't think of time as a strict progression of cause to effect," he advised, once they were safely inside the ship. "It's not an accurate model and it'll only mess with your head. It's like trying to think of a planet as flat – useful if you want to make a map of it on a flat piece of paper, but not helpful for much else." He laughed. "Now that you've set one legend in motion, where should we – ooh, what was that?"

He'd been interrupted by a petulant whistle from the console.

"Yes, yes, alright, I'm paying attention now, what?"

More bleeps and whistles.

"Really? You are pulling my leg."

A brief high-pitched beep.

"No, no, no, don't take it like that…" he sighed. "Come on. Tell me!"

Something flashed up on the monitor. He glanced at it and raised one eyebrow. "If you say so." He darted round to the other side of the console and flipped a couple of switches experimentally. "Hmph."

"Has it decided it's not listening any more?" Sarah asked. She was sat on the chair, reading the information scrolling across the screen.

"Oh, it's listening all right," the Doctor responded, now lying on his back and fiddling with the underside of the console, apparently at random. "It's just not taking instructions. It's taunting me!" He yanked hard at a couple of wires and shuffled out. "Argue with that. Go on, I dare you."

"What have you done?"

"I've given the system a bit of a jolt," he replied. "Let's see if it's had the desired effect." He flipped a different set of switches gingerly and yanked his hand back with a yelp. "Oww! There was absolutely no need for that," he told the machine sternly. The sternness was undermined somewhat by the suppressed giggle from behind him.

"Serve you right for messing with the circuits," Sarah commented, patting the console gently. "Poor TARDIS."

"Oh, come on," the Doctor protested. "You can't gang up on me with the ship!"

"Oh yeah?" she smirked, hand on hip. "What are you going to do about it?"

"Well," he said, shrugging, "I don't know. Right now, not much. The TARDIS isn't happy about something, and she's parked up in the vortex to run some self-diagnostics. For the moment, we can't land, we're stuck in here."

Sarah laughed. "Good."

The Doctor frowned. "Good?"

"Good," she affirmed. "I want to explore. Come on! You said it's bigger on the inside, and there's corridors leading off from this room. How far does this ship go on?"

"Not sure. It changes…" he replied. "The TARDIS is psychic – gets inside your head. It can go on as far as you need it to, whatever rooms you might imagine. In theory, it can go on pretty much for ever, but it'll fold in on itself."

She smiled. "Layers upon layers of space-time folded into one tiny little blue box. Is there a swimming pool?"

He laughed. "Probably. I've never looked for one, but I imagine there's one here somewhere. Although I suggest we try and go via the wardrobe."


End file.
